Six Kids in a Spaceship
by TheUltimatePsychoFanGirl
Summary: With Mustache Girl out sick for the day, Hat Kid's other friends try to cheer her up. Unfortunately, a slight mishap has turned her adult friends into kids.
1. Act 1: A Backfire Plan

**"Psycho, you maniac! You're starting _another_ story when you still have two incomplete ones?!"**

 **Yes, I am. Please enjoy.**

* * *

Hat Kid sighed glumly as she lied around at the center of the main hall. Rumbi vacuumed by her several times without a care in the world while Hat Kid watched in a depressed state.

Why was she sad? Because she had an entire Saturday planned out between herself and her friend Mustache Girl (otherwise known as Mu) and it had been ruined by her red-clad compadre catching a cold. Admittedly, challenging the girl in a race to see how quickly either could drench themselves in the Subcon River and then get their clothes to freeze at the edge of Queen Vanessa's territory was a bad idea to begin with, but they were kids! Kids were supposed to have fun and do stupid things.

Unfortunately, it seemed that yesterday's chilly challenge had gotten Mu a bit ill to the point of needing to stay with Cooking Cat for the day so she could get better. This sole reason really put a damper on things since Hat Kid could only spend so much weekend time with her friends before she had to fly back home for another week of school. What was a kid to do? She supposed it might be a good idea to get some of her chores done since she had been procrastinating on them for so long.

She got up from lying down only to immediately hear a knocking at her window. A certain shadowy figure and a goat's head popped up into her view as she approached. With a slight chuckle, Hat Kid opened up the window to let her friends in.

In addition to Snatcher and an Alpine Goat, the Conductor, DJ Grooves, and Mafia Boss (who had recently gotten his body back after some convincing) had joined the party wagon with an Alpine Nomad following behind.

"Why are you guys here?" Hat Kid asked, still sounding a bit let down.

"I heard about the red-hooded brat getting sick. I know you had a lot planned with her today so I thought I'd...let loose for a bit." Said Snatcher, "And besides, I'm still your legally obligated BFF. I'd be breaking my side of the contract if I didn't come to your side to make up for your loss."

"I'm here because Cooking Cat lives in my attic, and I can't stand the possibility of her bringing that mustached menace into my HQ," Mafia Boss explained rather bluntly, "The last thing I need is to catch her sickness...also I wanted to get rid of that favor I owe you for getting me my body back."

"Thank you MB...I guess," Hat Kid mumbled, "anyway what about you guys?" She turned to the other visitors.

"Rham missed you." The Nomad said, patting the goat's head.

"I hate seeing you look so depressed Darling, I absolutely _had_ to drop everything and cheer you up!" Grooves picked up the child and spun her the way a father affectionately did so with his own daughter. "I hope you don't mind."

"I had a day off already scheduled for today and thought I'd come over." The Conductor added last.

"I still find that hard to believe, Darling. The only times you have days off are when you have plans."

"I'm pretty sure I would remember if I had something planned DJ Peck Neck, stay outta me business."

While Grooves put down Hat Kid to banter with his competitor, the child couldn't help but feel uncomfortable about the situation.

"I appreciate you guys showing up to replace Mu for the day, but the things we do together are kinda...dumb kid stuff, you know? Like playing Hide and Seek in the air vents, or sledding down a flight of stairs without a helmet."

"Is...is that what kids do these days Lassie?"

"Those things sound dangerous Darling."

"Those things sound INCREDIBLE Kiddo."

"Those things sound dumb."

"I have no idea what any of those things are."

"Baaaaaa-aaaaaah."

Based on those responses alone, Hat Kid knew this pseudo-play date with her friends wasn't going to work. "I has a feeling I'd get those reactions, you guys can just do whatever. It's you being around that counts." She sighed, "I need to do my chores anyways, feel free to help if you want to."

Hat Kid slowly walked over to the kitchen so she could do something about her piling up dishes, among other things. The adults all looked to one another with a mixture of expressions.

"Poor lass, I haven't seen her that torn apart since the day after the Awards Ceremony." The Conductor's ears dipped down. The fatherly/grandfatherly part of him sensed a feeling of great disappointment from the child. Mafia Boss sensed it too, but that was because his 'children' were the mafia he had to command each day. Regardless, they felt a persistently annoying obligation to help her out so the disappointing sensation would go away.

"Hold on Darling, I'll help you out!" DJ Grooves called out, following behind Hat Kid.

Snatcher slinked into the Machine Room, where he immediately noticed the disarray in Hat Kid's bookshelf and decided to organize it, exclaiming that he would be "snooping around" if he was needed for anything. As a guy that read books in his down time, he felt a bit offended that his 'BFF' didn't have a neater looking shelf, so he decided to alphabetize it as a good deed and definitely not so he could see the kid's reaction when she couldn't find anything.

Rham and the Nomad just sat around with the latter combing the former's fur and pet talking it. Apparently the Nomad was a goat tamer, or groomer, or something along those lines. Nobody really knew why anybody from Alpine visited Hat Kid. Regardless, everyone was busy doing their own thing for about half an hour before an alarm went off.

 **"Attention! Your bi-monthly Time Piece check is today, please return to the main hall!"**

Hat Kid dashed out of the kitchen and immediately tapped on the monitor next to her vault, muttering 'peck' under her breath multiple times. She did a bunch of nonsense with the monitor before opening up the Time Vault and sighing for what felt like the 100th time that day, this time though, it was a sigh of defeat.

"What's this about a Time Piece check?" Snatcher asked. He had apparently moved from the Machine Room to the Bedroom at some point as he left the bedroom hallway with a colorful book in his hands.

"Put down my diary first, then I'll tell you."

Snatcher obliged, throwing it at Mafia Boss' face in a very passive aggressive way for no reason other than the fact that he just really hated the Boss' guts.

"Once every two months I have to open up the vault and make sure the Time Pieces aren't unstable or damaged. The computer can't check it on its own, so I have to do it manually."

"Can we help?" The Nomad asked.

"Sorry Ewe, but this is a Time Travelers-only job. There are very specific things that you need to know to determine if something is wrong with a Time Piece and I don't have time to list them off."

"Oh."

"You can be my sleep guards though, so I don't fall asleep on the job from not going to bed at all last night!"

"Sleep guard Ewe is on duty!" The Nomad exclaimed, staring down Hat Kid while perched on Rham's head. Hat Kid slowly counted each Time Piece that she checked.

"That could work…" The Conductor whispered to Mafia Boss, dragging him to a distant corner of the main hall.

"What do you mean?" The other whispered back.

"Lassie is sad because she wanted to do things with the Mustached Lass that she can't do with us because they're both young'uns, right?"

"Yes."

"So that means we just need to find some kids around her age to play with."

"We don't know any other children."

"Let me finish! I'm proposing that take a Time Piece, break open a portal, and find some peers for her to play with."

"Darling, that is the worst idea I've ever heard." DJ Grooves butted in, startling the owl.

"I have to agree with Captain Disco over here, that is a terrible idea." Snatcher added, making the corner rather cramped at this point.

The corner was silent as Hat Kid asked Ewe to take her diary back to her room for her. "Boss Guy, you can be the sleep guard until Ewe comes back, right? Ewe's probably going to be distracted for a while."

"Sure." He waited for Hat Kid to continue counting before he slowly leaned into the other adults and whispered "I'd go with the plan."

"Thank ye." "Darling no!" "Are you an idiot?!"

Before the group could argue, a small snore could be heard from the vault. Mafia Boss had already failed his one job and let Hat Kid fall asleep.

Conductor seized this opportunity and scurried over to the vault to pluck a random Time Piece.

"Darling, did we learn _nothing_ from the Award Ceremony? Or from when a certain Red-Hood someone decided to rule the world?" DJ Grooves asked, clearly annoyed.

"Those were for selfish desires Peck Neck. Getting the Lass some peers to play with is a perfectly good cause!"

The DJ didn't hesitate to lunge at the other bird with full intent to stop this madness before it began. The game of keep away that ensued went on for about five minutes, with Mafia Boss and the Conductor passing the Time Piece to one another, to Grooves' annoyance, while Snatcher cackled in amusement at the center of the room.

Unfortunately, nobody was watching where they were going as one person ended up tripping on Snatcher's tail, which in turn tripped up everybody else and caused the Time Piece to brake.

"25!" Hat Kid yelled out as the shattering noise jolted her awake.

Something about the Time Piece's usual properties was not normal as, when it shattered, it didn't just rewind time to a few seconds earlier; it tried to pull through with what The Conductor, the guy that had dropped the Time Piece, has in mind when he stole it in the first place: Get Hat Kid some peers to play with. The hourglass definitely did it job, just not in the way that was intended.

Instead of one Boss of the Mafia, a shadowy noodle man, two birds, and a goat the height of a small building, there were now two humans boys, a duo of smaller birds, and a goat that was half a head taller than Hat Kid herself.

The former adults looked at each other in shock before staring in the direction of a very unhappy Hat Kid.

"It was Conductor's idea." A black-haired boy said, pointing at the small owl in a striped-shirt.


	2. Act 2: The Trouble With Time Pieces

**Note to self: Updating a story is much easier when you already have two chapters complete in advance.**

* * *

In the Mafia HQ, Cooking Cat and Mu were in the feline's quaint little loft, the latter sitting miserably inside a cocoon of blankets and pillows.

"Whatever you're making, it already smells horrible." Mu complained.

"That's because I have to use some pretty nasty ingredients to make you feel better sweetums." Cooking Cat said, "I buy quite a bit of healing foods from that Badge Seller man for when my sisters back in Alpine get sick, and I can promise you that these ingredients are not going to taste well together."

"Then why are you using them?"

"Because after one bowl and a good nap, you're going to be feeling much better."

Mu was skeptical but took the cat's word for it. She sneezed up a storm and felt even worse very quickly.

"You should rest sweetums, I'll let you know when the soup is done."

"Oooookaaaaaay" Mu moaned, sinking her head into the blanket cocoon.

—

"Did I miss something?" Ewe the Nomad asked, having just returned from trying to put Hat Kid's diary back to her bedroom.

"Yes." Was the only reply they received from almost everyone in the room, aside from Rham who hobbled over to Ewe and gently bah'd.

"Oh, Rham! You're a young goat again!" Ewe exclaimed, petting the small protector.

"Wouldn't that be a kid?" Asked the prince-turned Snatcher.

"Ok, _who_ are you exactly?" The young Mafia Boss asked. He was sporting some grey sweatpants and a red hoodie (like a lot of boys in Hat Kid's school), so he looked mostly like a miniature version of his adult self.

"I'm _Snatcher_ you jarhead!" The other yelled, looking more or less like the a Hat Kid-sized version of the prince she'd seen in Subcon's pink Time Rift.

"You used to be a human? I thought ye just kinda appeared with the rest of that madness you call a home." Conductor said before making a disgruntled face in response to his younger voice. He and Grooves had clearly gotten the short end of the stick and were spitting images of their childhood selves, who had definitely been younger than Hat Kid, from the Studios' pink Time Rift.

"Guys!" Hat Kid yelled, very clearly ticked off, "Conductor, explanation, now."

"You were so lonely Lassie! I just thought I'd help ye out and find some other children to play with is all!"

"And your solution was to turn yourself and every other adult in the main hall...into a kid?"

"No, that was unintentional."

The lone girl of the group jumped down and swiped the Time Piece that had caused this mess and looked over it thoroughly.

"So uh...yer gonna use that to change us back, right Lass?" Conductor asked.

"Are you crazy? No! This Time Piece is completely unstable!" She pointed to the sands inside the hourglass. Normally they were a light yellow color, but in this case at least half of the grains were pure white. How did they not notice this? "Using it to undo the problem would probably make the situation _worse_."

All the boys glared at Conductor menacingly, especially Grooves.

"I can't run Mafia Town like this, how do we change back?" Mafia Boss asked.

"I don't know, most of the people that were crazy enough to break an unstable Time Piece has never lived to tell the tale." Hat Kid grumbled, "Those people were usually non-time travelers that wanted power, and they usually either exploded or got erased from existence after trying to get what they wanted."

"So we're _stuck_ like this?" Grooves panicked before covering his beak, his voice came out incredibly squeaky and timid, to his embarrassment and Conductor's amusement.

"What happened to yer deep baritone voice DJ Peck Neck?" Conductor jeered, "You sound like a wee mouse."

"You're one to talk! You sound like a...a…" Grooves stuttered before looking at the floor, "shut up…"

"Are you crying?"

"No." Grooves lied. There were clearly tears welling up.

"Kid, how am I supposed to make contracts when I'm not the right legal age to make them?!" Snatcher asked, "Don't you have _any_ way to fix this?"

Hat Kid thought for a second. She snapped her fingers and nodded, "My bookshelf should have a manual of listed mistakes and problems that have occurred in the past when Time Pieces were accidentally misused in certain ways. I don't remember what it's called but I know where to find it."

The girl ran off into the Machine Room. Snatcher's face became very panicked as he remembered that he had alphabetized the books in that room; if Hat Kid didn't know what the book was called… then that meant-

"Who rearranged my books?!"

"I thought it would be funny!" Snatcher exclaimed.

Hat Kid had returned to the Main Hall and looked about ready to beat up the prince with her umbrella. Her expression softened though a second later and she hugged him.

"Kid, am I crying?"

"Just a little bit."

"Crap." He hadn't even realized he had been crying, but apparently he had. "Why am I crying?"

Hat Kid let go of him to turn to Grooves, who had hidden himself in a corner of the room so Conductor wouldn't see him crying as well.

"I think…" she mumbled, "I think you're bodies are conflicted on whether you should be adults or kids, so your brain is sending in signals that are appropriate for one or the other and acting accordingly."

Snatcher made a very annoyed noise, "Figures…I always wussed out when my fencing instructors tried to challenge me since I was never a fighter."

"That might do it…" Hat Kid said as she walked over to Grooves. He and Conductor were barely taller than Hat Kid as adults, and as such were much smaller as children, so she picked up the young penguin and gave him a gentle hug. He reciprocated her affections by nudging the kid's chest with his cheek.

"Thank you Darwlin'." Grooves mumbled, blushing at his baby lisp.

"I'm gonna need to look through my entire bookshelf to see if and how I can fix this," Hat Kid said to everyone, "Can I trust you guys to not kill yourselves or each other while I'm doing that?"

"Probably." Mafia Boss replied.

"Absolutely!" Ewe said, sitting next to their sleeping goat companion.

"Sure." Snatcher said after, trying his best to still sound like his usual self.

"I'll try me best I suppose…" Conductor mumbled last. He was kind of jealous that Grooves was getting friendly treatment after **he** went through all that trouble to try and cheer her up. He'd probably tease the penguin later.

"In that case, I'll be in the Machine Room." Hat Kid proudly proclaimed, placing Grooves back onto the ground as she did so and heading to her desired destination.

Asking someone other than Ewe to make sure she didn't fall asleep had been her first mistake that day; expecting five children other than herself to not cause trouble on her spaceship was her second.


	3. Act 3: Other Problems

**Here I am, back with Act 3!**

 **There'll probably be about 6 or 7 acts in total depending on how things play out, and if that ends up as the case then this'll be the first planned multi-chapter story that I've ever completed.**

 **Anyways, on with the story. (And PS, I know people are going to think I'm sounding desperate here, but I'd really appreciate a review or two because I like knowing what you guys think of what I'm writing.)**

* * *

"Alrighty then, soup's done!" Cooking Cat exclaimed. She poured some of the liquid into a bowl and pestered her little patient awake within her pillow and blanket fort of solitude.

Mu stirred and lifted her head up, scrunching up her nose. "It smells horrible!"

"I know it does and I'm afraid it's not going to taste any better, you should be thankful it's edible." The cat frowned, "Do you wanna eat it on your own, or am I gonna have to feed it to you myself?"

"I can do it." Mu grumbled, taking the bowl and a spoon to go with it.

With only a single spoonful, Mustache Girl could tell that this soup was going to leave a bad taste in her mouth; if Cooking Cat was right though, it would make her feel better. Thankfully, Mu likes being healthy and not having a runny nose, and decided to eat up as much of the soup that she could muster.

—

"So did anyone else know that Mister Snatcher used to be a prince, because I certainly didn't before this." Ewe said.

"I'm just as surprised about this outcome as you are," Snatcher replied, "I was a shadow of a dead prince, I thought that, if what happened to us was gonna happen, I would be immune since shadows don't age and such. You get what I'm saying?"

Ewe wasn't paying attention, they were too busy pampering the goat. "Rham, I'd nearly forgotten how soft you were as a kid."

"You should feel lucky, you're technically the adult of the spaceship now." He added.

Since Mafia Boss wasn't in the mood to converse, he decided to keep an eye on Conductor and Grooves; his men were known to fight each other in occasions where something ticked them off, and making sure the younger birds didn't kill each other was pretty much the same scenario but with more feathers. Snatcher didn't hesitate to pull out some pillows from Hat Kid's bedroom and make a sofa out of them since Hat Kid never kept chairs on her spaceship.

Mafia Boss had tried to sit next to Snatcher on the pillow couch multiple times but was met with getting booted off within seconds; Snatcher apparently held him as an accomplice for Conductor's idiotic plan and as such wanted nothing to do with him, so he decided to just lie down on the burger cushion on the opposite side of the room instead and fiddle around with the sesame seed buttons on the bun.

The train set and crayons that had kid had proclaimed to be 'relics' had been pulled out for the birds to busy themselves with so they weren't at each other's throats, which was perfectly fine until they started writing mean things about their respected competitor on their papers and began to fight again after fifteen minute of peace.

Things only got worse when Hat Kid got a holo message from the planet.

"What _now_?!" The child asked as she answered her holographic monitor.

"Hey little girl, are you there?" It was a Moon penguin.

"Yeah."

"Oh good! The Express Owls needed to contact you."

"For what?"

"For findin' me pecking no good brother that's what!" Said a very Scottish-sounding voice. An owl that looked like a more tangerine-colored conductor wearing a green uniform instead of black shoved his way into view. "He's skippin' out on our family reunion and I've been told that he's hanging out with you instead of his kin!"

"Oh peck, I forgot about the reunion." Conductor mumbled to himself as he hid behind a relic stand.

"Well I _did_ say you probably had today off for a _reason_ dawlin'." Grooves berated to the other.

"Shut it you wee crybaby!"

The owl on the monitor looked like he was ready to lose his patience. "We planned this reunion two months ago and even scheduled an off day for him, where's me brother at?! I need to give him a piece of me mind!"

Hat Kid stomped over to where the young directors were bickering.

"Lassie-"

"You did this just so you could get away from your own family?!"

"No! I genuinely promised I'd come to this reunion!" The owl explained himself, "I had it marked on me calendar and everything! But then I heard the mustached Lass got sick and I just kinda...forgot?"

Hat Kid couldn't tell if the bird was bluffing or not, and honestly she didn't care at this point, so she picked up the bird by the back of his shirt collar and carried him over to the monitor like that.

"Lassie, please! I've already angered Greg by not being there, he's gonna flip his lid when he sees me like this!"

"I believe _this_ is what you're looking for." Hat Kid carelessly raised up the small bird.

"Is that me brother?!" Greg exclaimed, "What the peck did ya do to him you wee devil child?!"

"Actually I did this to meself." The Conductor fessed up. "And you can't take me to the reunion as an owlet, Greg! You just can't!"

"Blake you peck neck! You're going to the reunion, regardless of whether you're an owlet, an egg, or a pile of bones, ya hear me!"

Conductor groaned, "Fine! But I won't like it…"

"Good." Greg said, he sounded much more happy now, and oddly enough a bit more Irish as well. "I'll be waitin' for ye at your movie studio then _big brother_." He snickered a bit before turning ending the call from his side.

"Lassie…" Conductor whimpered.

"Yeah?"

"I think I need a hug."

Despite still being mad at him for multiple reasons, Hat Kid did in fact change the way she was holding the owlet so she could give him a hug.

"Do you want me to go to the studio with you so you can meet your brother?" Hat Kid asked.

"...maybe…"

"Can...can I come too?" Grooves quietly asked.

"Why? So you can peckin' make fun of me?"

"No...I just think you deserve love and support."

Hat Kid found it rather sweet that Grooves was wanting to do this for his competitor, but knew that this was because Grooves had apparently been a warm-hearted child growing up and not because he felt genuinely bad for the other. If they had been adults, Grooves would have been scolding the Conductor for taking his family for granite, but that wasn't the case right now.

Knowing there was no way to deny young Grooves his request without feeling a tinge of guilt, Hat Kid brought him with herself and The Conductor to their touchdown outside Dead Bird Studio while Snatcher, Mafia Boss, Rham, and Ewe stayed on the ship to wait for Hat Kid's return.

Snatcher hadn't really been paying any heed to what was happening around him as he had been lost in his thoughts in memories for the past several minutes, remembering all the things he did with his family when he was Hat Kid's age; he vividly recalled his father teaching him how to ride a horse, how to sword fight...how to dance at a ball. His father and mother were very eager to teach him how a prince should dance with a princess over the course of a month, he remembered practicing non stop until he was near-perfect. He had met Vanessa for the first time at a royal ball that following day, and then when they were teenagers a few years later they met again to eventually become a couple, and then she was his fiancé, and then…then he had to go to college, and the visit home only made things go downhill from there.

Snatcher sighed, life had been really simple before he met Vanessa; actually, his afterlife was easier without Vanessa too. Wh-

"Earth to Crowny, wake up!"

"Huh?!" Snatcher jolted out of his trance, locking eyes with Mafia Boss. "What is it?! What do you want?!"

"I'm taking some liberties and making lunch, do you want anything?"

"You ca-you can cook?" He stammered, "And by that I mean you can cook _actual_ food?!"

"Of course! What do you take me for, my own men? Answer the question."

Snatcher was about to argue with the other man...boy...person, but then something came to mind.

"Does the kid have bacon on this ship?"

"I found some in a bag in the fridge along with some fresh food from our planet," the other said, "I think the Cooking Cat was going to do something with them, but _I'm_ going to use it to make lunch because I'm starving and also probably the only person on this ship that knows how to cook at this time."

"I don't care what you make, all I ask is that my plate has bacon on it."

"Might I ask why?" The Boss asked as he marched back towards the kitchen.

"I haven't had bacon in a really, _really_ long time."

"Fine by me." MB shrugged, walking through the doors.

"Oh and one more thing!"

The Boss stuck his head out from the kitchen to listen, "Yes?"

He was quickly met with a pillow thrown at his face and Snatcher exclaiming "Don't call me Crowny!"

He took the hint and kicked the pillow at his feet before getting to work.


	4. Act 4: Minor Annoyances

**These chapters are gonna start getting longer, hope you guys are ready.**

 **Also don't forget to leave your opinions in the reviews, I really appreciate it!**

* * *

At this point in time, Mu had somehow finished her small bowl of gross healing soup and was once again burying herself in blankets in pillows.

Cooking Cat had no objections to this and let the girl rest, knowing that it could only help.

—

Hat Kid and the young directors landed in the parking lot just outside of Dead Bird Studios and made their way inside the building with Hat Kid holding a bird in either arm. Surely enough, Greg was waiting for them by the reception desk and seemed pleasantly surprised to actually see them.

"I'm impressed, I thought for certain I'd be waiting for fifteen minutes while you ran amok to avoid me."

"Don't patronize me Greg, I said I'd come so now I'm here." Conductor growled, "I'm guessing Redd is picking us up via me train?"

"No, Walter."

"Really, I thought you'd be milking in the opportunity to embarrass me by summoning the _evil_ quadruplet." Conductor sounded half annoyed and half shocked.

"I'm not carrying two birds for fifteen minutes," Hat Kid declared, handing the young owl to his brother, "here you go."

"Lassie!"

Hat Kid ignored him and put Grooves on the ground. The boy hid behind her legs as he spotted a small group of Moon Penguins over on his side of the studio. He didn't want them to see him like this, as a shy, timid, and quiet child. He was seen by the public as a bold and loud bird that could handle the largest of crowds, but like this he couldn't even handle being in the same lobby as his fans.

"Hey David, ye doing alright?" Greg asked Grooves, startling him. "I didn't want to point out how much in the same boat you were in as me brother, but you look troubled."

"I, um, well-"

"It's because DJ Peck Neck is a helpless frightened crybaby now that he doesn't have his stage presence and platform shoes." Conductor teased.

"Blake!" Barked Greg, already tired of his brother's nonsense. "At least have _some_ respect for your competitor, sheesh. If you can't be nice to someone that's clearly younger than you than, then you can expect the same treatments from yours truly."

The younger owl huffed, of _course_ DJ Grooves was getting attention like the baby he was being. Nobody deserves to be reprimanded more than the bird that was only trying to help out.

"Hey there little fella," a moon penguin approached and talked to Grooves, "I couldn't help but notice you were eyeballing our side of the studio. Are you a DJ Grooves fan too?"

The child director hesitantly nodded his head; his own fans, who didn't ever reach up to Hat Kid's chin half the time, were now taller than him and it didn't feel right.

A familiar train whistle blew outside the studio, indicating that Walter had arrived. Hat Kid followed Greg outside assuming that Grooves would follow behind, except he _didn't_ follow behind, he was still talking with the _oh so friendly_ penguin in the reception area that wouldn't leave him alone on things he already knew about his adult self. He started getting more freaked out when other penguins came to see him as well, wondering where his parents were; he was getting all sorts of social anxiety and he didn't even know where Hat Kid was anymore, he felt completely alone.

Back with the aforementioned Hat Kid, she and the owls were standing right next to the Owl Express with another Conductor look-alike exiting from the front of the locomotive, this one had white feathers and a grey uniform.

"Looks like I'm here at a convenient time then, right Greg?" Walter asked, he sounded incredibly calm and gentle.

"Indeed."

"And who's little thing is this?" Walter tilted his head and smiled, giving Conductor's cheek fluff a scratch, "He's a sweet little thing for certain, and he reminds me quite a bit of Blake from when we were owlets."

"Eh, he's an orphan kid, apparently they did some blood work on him and he turned out to be one of Redd's granddies." Greg lied, "We might be adopting him as part of the family, oh, and his name is _also_ Blake."

Content with what was given to him, Walter and his brothers boarded the train with the former briefly getting to know Hat Kid as well before driving the train off to its destination. It was at this point that Hat Kid suddenly realized that Grooves wasn't with her and she promptly began to panic.

She ran back into the studio to find the group of penguins chatting nervously to one another.

"Where is he?!"

"The little guys? He um, he kinda freaked out and ran deeper into the studio, we're trying to find him." One of the penguins answered.

That wasn't good. She should have been keeping an eye on him, but she had been too busy trying to keep the Conductor out of trouble to notice how uncomfortable Grooves had been during the whole thing; if she was a babysitter, Hat Kid would probably have been fired for this mistake.

At least she knew the layout of the studio pretty well; how hard could it possibly be to find one penguin child?

—

"This is actually edible!" Snatcher exclaimed, having just tried a piece of bacon that Mafia Boss made.

"I told you so." The other said boastfully. Next to the bacon, he had also cooked up some other meaty foods like sausages, ham, and strips of tilapia (although fish technically wasn't a meat, the Boss considered it a meaty food). He of course made salad as well, both to balance out the large amount of meat that was made and to accommodate for the Alpine inhabitants who mostly ate plant material.

"This is really good Boss man." Ewe said in response to the salad, Rham munching away on most of plant-based food.

"Oh, please, just called me Dimitri!" Mafia Boss replied, "If we're going to be children for a while, I might as well get accustomed to a first-name basis."

"Why?" Snatcher asked.

"How would you react if a group of children, and Ewe, just strolled through your forest all willy nilly, and they all referred to one particular child as their Boss? Wouldn't that be strange?"

"From a technical standpoint…" he paused, chomping down on more bacon before responding, "yeah, I guess so. Also, off topic, but this bacon is _really_ good."

"I rest my case...also thank you."

They all ate 'til they decided that enough was enough and saved all the leftovers in lidded-bowls for later. They remained mostly silent and refused to look each other in the eyes, but any conversation that did occur was solely between Snatcher and 'Dimitri'; it started with small talk until eventually they started cracking jokes and just started acting like the young boys that they were. Their jokes, depending on the person, were either crude or subtle, and neither of them seemed to mind the juxtaposition of their drastically different senses of humor as they gradually began to jab at the absurdity of their adult lifestyles.

"You know, it's just occurred to me." Dimitri said, "We're actually, genuinely kids again. The context of how this happened aside, this return to a simpler time is the sort of thing most people long to have happen to them."

"What's your point?" Snatcher asked quietly, falling back into an old habit in which he would become oddly quiet when people talked to him.

"We don't know how long we're going to be like this, and quite frankly I think we're wasting a perfect opportunity to go crazy without any repercussions." He gave off an mischievous smirk, "Why don't we go downtown and create some chaos? Those two girls do it all the time, might as well see what all the hubbub is about."

The Snatcher everyone knew came back like a resurrected flame as his face, while before looking soft and reserved like a prince of yold, switched to a toothy smirk. "Dimitri, you mad genius, you're absolutely right. Let's royal rumpus like this is our last day on Earth!"

"With pleasure!" The mafia boy took hold of the prince's wrist and dragged him over to the other side of the main hall as they made their way to Mafia Town to wreck up Dimitri's own home, as you do.

This, of course left only Ewe and young Rham on Hat Kid's spaceship.

"Oh, I guess I was a bit late in stopping them…" Ewe muttered, "I suppose that doesn't matter. We know where they're going at least, and Hat Kid should be back with the penguin person any second now. We should help her find that book she needs!"

Rham bleated in agreement, hobbling to the Machine Room with Ewe not far behind. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the unstable Time Piece, which Hat Kid had appropriately labeled as unstable and placed in her chair at some point, was missing, snatched away without any alarm.

It could only spell trouble depending on who had taken it, and the person that had already knew _exactly_ what to use it for.

* * *

 **I'm going to reply to current reviews down here now.**

 **Girrafeyla10: I may be an evil person, but I won't humiliate The Conductor. Rest assured however, he will be learning a lesson in this story. Also thank you for the compliments!**

 **Inknroses: Grooves is a small innocent bean as a child and must be protected. :3**


	5. Act 5: Chaos Ensues

**Welcome back to another chapter, this one is 1,000 words longer than the last one and that's probably the longest these chapters will get with this form of storytelling.**

 **Don't forget to leave your opinions in the reviews! It may seem like a tiny and unimportant thing to do but I love reading what you guys leave me!**

* * *

"How're you feeling sweetie?" Cooking Cat asked.

"Amazing! I don't feel sick in the slightest! Mouth still tastes like gross healing soup though…"

"Yeah, that tends to happen."

Now that she was back in action, Mustache Girl was psyched to spend the rest of her day with Hat Kid. She and CC were about ready to stroll out of Mafia HQ when a group of the titular men ran in from the only entrance in terror.

"That can't be good." CC said as she and Mu checked to see what the ruckus was about. They were both astonished and mortified to see a slew of graffiti and carnage throughout town.

"Okay, scaring away the mafia for me is one thing, but trashing my home while you do it is _completely_ unacceptable! Let's go Cooking Cat!" Mu said, jumping down into the street to lay a smackdown on the perpetrator of this mess.

—

"Grooves! Come on, we need to get back to the spaceship!" Hat Kid had been calling out to the young DJ for ten minutes already. She had summarized the events that transpired on her ship to the moon penguins in the lobby, shocking them and also making them feel bad for not knowing when to stop pestering someone that clearly didn't want to talk. Since there was no recording today, the searching party had to spread itself thin in hopes of narrowly finding Grooves.

"You don't think he ran into the basement, do you?" One penguin asked.

"I sure hope not, I can barely navigate through that place myself. We'd never see him again if he wandered down there." Hat Kid replied, turning over every loose prop in sight to find her friend.

Somehow it didn't surprise her that Grooves was nowhere to be found in his part of the studio since the moon penguins would only ever think to search for him there; they were scavenging through the Conductor's side of the studio at this point, and everybody was beginning to wonder if the DJ really _did_ decide to hide in the impossibly maze-like basement when Hat Kid heard a whimper nearby. In the empty space above the basement elevator was a tiny head peering over and visibly shaking.

Based on the position of a knocked over ladder, Hat Kid had a pretty good idea as to how the child got stuck. She, of course, didn't need a ladder to parkour her way to the top and gently carry the bird into her arms and back into the ground level.

"I found him." Hat Kid said aloud. A chorus of relieved sighs throughout the studio signaled the end of the stressful search as everyone returned to the parking lot outside the studio.

"Hey Grooves, there's no hard feeling on us right? For stressing you out?" One of the penguins asks.

The child shook his head and mumbled a quite "nu-uh" to the other.

"Okay, that's good. We're _really_ sorry for causing this to happen, you just kinda looked like a lost kid and we got worried, ya know?"

"I think he's tired," Hat Kid said, "running away from your problems is hard work, I know that from experience. Er-" she paused, "forget that last part. I'm going back to the spaceship so I can fix this accidental playdate."

She pulled out a remote from her pocket and pressed a button that took her back to the ship, which was oddly empty and smelled like cooked meat.

"Hewwo?" Grooves asked. Hat Kid wanted to chuckle a bit at the lisp, but was too worried about where everybody had gone. "Where's the Time Piece?"

Hat Kid looked to her pilot seat, the Time Piece was most definitely gone, note and all.

"WHO THE PErrriiiiiiipherals took the Time Piece?! And where is everybody?!" Hat Kid just barely avoided saying the P-word with Grooves just sitting in her arms.

"We're over here!" Ewe peeked her head out from the Machine Room, "Rham and I divided your books based on what did and didn't involve Time Pieces so your search would be easier."

"That's great! But where's Snatcher and Mafia Boss?"

Ewe visibly reared back, Hat Kid wasn't going to like what she heard. "Uh, well first Dimitri-Boss-person made lunch for everybody using the food in your fridge, and then he and the Mister Snatcher ran off from the ship to visit Mafia Town and uh…'Royal Rumpus' through it."

Hat Kid inhaled and then exhaled deeply, she was so absolutely tired of today. She handed Grooves to Ewe and walked into her bedroom where she pushed out a pile of pillows from her pillow mountain into the center of the Main Hall. She took back Grooves and placed him in the pillow pile before listing off a set of instruction.

"Grooves, take a nap, you deserve it. Ewe, you and Rham keep narrowing down searches, the book I'm looking for should have chapters on misused Time Pieces, mistakes regarding the uses, and general information about unstable Time Pieces." Nobody had ever seen Hat Kid so dead-serious and aggravated, she was so scarily stern. "I'm going to Mafia Town. In the name of the Mighty and Curious CEO of Time himself, **please** do not leave the spaceship unless there is an emergency."

There was an "okay" from two out of three passengers and a "baaah" from the last third before Hat Kid opened the window hatch and leaped out onto the planet below.

—

Greg sat on one of the many empty seats in the passenger cart while The Conductor sat in the seat across from him, curled up into a ball of feathers and fury.

"So why didn't ya tell him the truth?" The boy asked.

"Because I don't have any reason to humiliate you, Blake. You're my big brother, and I care a lot about you, I just wish you'd cherish your family as much as you cherish Pa's train."

"Ye can't verbally chastise me for respecting the only thing I have left of him!"

"You get parts of this train blown up in every other movie you make, How is that respect?!"

Conductor didn't reply and instead buried his face under his arms.

The sounds of the train from the passenger cart were somewhat nostalgic, they reminded him of when he first road the train; he and his three siblings were small enough for their mother to carry all of them at the same time in her arms. As the oldest sibling, The Conductor has always seen himself most fit to take his father's place when the old bird retired. He could still hear his father's many similes and metaphors to help him understand the workings of the train, such as comparing the engine to a heart, and the windows to eyes.

"Greg, you know Redd is going to recognize me when we get to the reunion, right? He's not going to fall for your lie like Walter." The Conductor said.

Greg's ears dipped down, as if those words physically hurt him.

"What?"

"Blake...Redd's gone...he's, you know…"

"What?! When did this happen?!" He stood up on the seat, absolutely flabbergasted.

"The same night as your stupid movie awards, I tried to call ye, but you never picked up or called me back." Greg looked at him angrily now, "I know for a fact that darn ceremony doesn't last hours into the night, so clearly you were ignoring me."

That's right, the ceremony. He had been so preoccupied with what was happening, no excuse in the world could justify him being in the basement with Hat Kid and DJ Peck Neck that late into the night.

"I know you and Redd never got along, but the least you could've done was told me you weren't gonna go to the funeral. I waited for you to call me up with some hairball excuse for not being able to show up and I got nothin'."

The Conductor tried to come up with a rebuttal, but everything he started to stammer our came out shorter than his current stature; he turned his back away from Greg and stared out the window.

"Blake?" Greg asked, was his brother sniffling? He picked up the child, who instinctively tried to curl back up into a ball.

"I...I never even got to tell him that I loved him!" The boy cried, "I'm the oldest brother, I should've been visiting you guys. I should've been visiting _him_ , but now I can never do that because he's gone!"

"B-Blake…" Greg wasn't sure if this behavior was from genuine grief or childish instinct, but it definitely broke his heart to see his sibling so upset. He held his brother close and scratched the fluff around his cheeks, a method that their mother had always used to sooth them when she was among the living.

Greg quietly hushed the other for a few minutes, it felt like raising one of his own kids again. He continued to scratch the cheeks and even hummed their mother's old lullaby until-

"Greg?"

"Hm?"

"Can we go see Walter before the train reaches its last stop?"

Greg happily carried the other towards the front of the train. While the closer passenger carts were half-filled with CAW agents on their rounds to uncover a case in their next stop, this didn't deter Greg from shoving the agents aside while the taller birds commented on and coo'd at the owlet in his arms.

They reached the front of the train and waited until the crows had all stepped off to talk to the current driver.

"Hey Walt." Greg started.

"Yes?"

"We need to tell you something."

"Really?...What is it?..."

—

"Milli-charge!" Dimitri yelled, pointing a long stick in one direction and watching a small ball of electricity catch a random tree ablaze.

Both he and Snatcher had a good chuckle at watching the leaves shrivel and curl up into ashes before continuing their chaos. Dimitri himself had pulled the hood part of his jacket over his head to add a touch of rogueness to his appearance while he spray-painted every wall that he could reach.

Snatcher helped out occasionally by rummaging through garbage and throwing its contents, or kicking down things that weren't meant to be kicked like trash cans and mailboxes, but he was mostly preoccupied with a piece of green-ish lace that was attached to a certain time-stopping hat, which had been conveniently hiding inside Hat Kid's closet when he visited her bedroom.

"Heh, no wonder that Mustache Girl spends so much time trashing my HQ, ruining other people's stuff is satisfying!" The young boss chuckled while shooting another one of his much weaker lightning attacks at a distant umbrella.

"I'm pretty sure she does it because you took over her home but, Eh, I guess this is an apples and oranges situation." Snatcher replied to him while leaning against a wall.

"HEY!" Called out a familiar voice. The boys turned to see Mustache Girl starting directly at them from the top of a roof.

"Run for it?" Snatcher quietly asked.

"RUN FOR IT!" was Dimitri's loud reply as he scaled the nearby wall and beelined deeper into town.

Snatcher ran into another direction with the intent of reaching at least one edge of the island. He put the stolen Time Stop Hat on over his crown and immediately tested it out. The whole experience was surreal since, contrary to its name, the hat didn't so much _stop_ time as it slowed it down immensely. He'd gotten pretty far until the hat wore off, where he spotted Cooking Cat heading towards him.

The hat wouldn't be done with cooldown before she reached him, so Snatcher went by a different approach and pulled out the unstable Time Piece.

"Alright I'm gonna need to ask a favor of you." He stood in place and mumbled to the hourglass, "Do you think you could stop that cat for about ten minutes? It's literally all the time I need to get to Subcon. Ok? I'm gonna break you now."

As he announced, Snatcher broke the Time Piece at his feet when Cooking Cat got really close. The hourglass fixed itself in seconds, leaving Snatcher unchanged, but freezing his feline foe, midair, in a pouncing position.

"Thanks!" He told the hourglass, picking it up and using the Time Stop Hat to continue on his way.

Dimitri wasn't doing as well in his chase as he was evenly matched against Mu. They tackled, kicked, and punched each other until the boy found himself completely cornered.

Mu, using a power she still partially had during her world-ruling endeavor, trapped Dimitri in a glass-like bubble that was slightly sunk into the ground; neither of them could hurt each other, but neither of them could move the bubble either until it was broken.

Hat Kid touched-down into town around this time and caught the last minute of the chase.

"Mu!" Hat Kid called, running towards the other and hugging her, "I thought you were sick."

"I got better," said Mu, "good thing I did too. This kid was trashing up the place."

"I noticed," The Kid's expression switched over to displeasure, "do you mind explaining yourself mister Boss of the Mafia?"

"You can't hold me accountable for what your stupid Time Piece did to me!" Dimitri yelled.

"Actually, I can. You could've ignored the calling to trash your home, but you didn't. And now you owe Mu and the your mafia an apology."

Mu lifted an eyebrow at the confusing conversation while Dimitri sighed in defeat.

"It's a long story." Hat Kid and the boy both said before catching the other girl up on the situation.

—

"Okay, wait." Mustache Girl said after receiving some needed exposition, the three kids were now in the spaceship with Cooking Cat and the others, "This all happened because I got sick and everybody wanted to make you feel better? On _this_ day in particular?"

"Yes, it is, you should get sick less often." Dimitri grumbled.

"You know it's quite surprising to see you like this again Dimitri, I was only a kitten when you were Hat Kid's age." Cooking Cat said. She had been found still frozen in Mafia Town and had just gotten out of her paralyzed state.

"Your real name is Dimitri?" Mu chuckled, "That's such a dumb name."

This ticked Dimitri off, "It's not a dumb name! It's derived from the Greek Goddess Demeter!"

"Guys!" Hat Kid had that agitated tone again that shut everybody up. "CC, you and Mafia Boss know each other?"

"Of course we know each other, do you really think a cat could live in my attic for years without me noticing?" Dimitri exclaimed, "I hired her to fix my men's terrible cooking." He paused, reflecting on the memory with utter disappointment. "It...it could not be fixed, so I just...asked her just replace their cooking with her own."

"Okay, that mystery is solved. Now where's Snatcher?"

"You mean you don't know?"

All eyes widened.

"He froze me in place with that Time Piece he took and ran off using your Time Stop Hat." Cooking Cat said, "He mentioned going to Subcon beforehand."

"I'll be back, you guys stay here! I've already got him all figured out!" Hat Kid repositioned the Spaceship over Subcon Forest before jumping back down.

"Heh, I get it."

"Shut up Dimitri."

* * *

 **Review Replying Time!**

 **Giraffeyla10: Oh Yes. Also I'm super glad that I'm handling these characters so perfectly, you can thank my obsessive watching of 1,000 different AHiT playthroughs. •w•**

 **CeleneTheAngel: Snatcher and Dimitri have amazing destructive chemestry, it was bound to happen. You're in luck this chapter because this installment was definitely longer! Not sure if I can top that in this story but I will try!**


	6. Act 6: Royal Pains

**School is out and I am free for the summer! Here's a new chapter at 1 in the morning as celebration! This is my longest chapter yet with over 4000 words!**

 **Remember to leave your opinions in the reviews! I appreciate reading them!**

 **Quick warning that this particular chapter will contain physical violence and angst. You have been warned.**

* * *

Ewe and Rham were doing pretty well with going through Hat Kid's books, so much so that neither of them were aware that she, Dimitri, and the other two visitors from Mafia Town had shown back up until things got very, very loud in the Main Hall.

"You look like you need assistance." Ewe said.

"Gee, you don't say." Mu loudly grumbled while chasing after Dimitri, who had taken Grooves' glasses out of boredom.

Mu would normally be able to catch up to Dimitri, but she currently could not do that as she was both running and carrying a very upset penguin child in her arms. She had picked the boy up without thinking and was now regretting it since Grooves already didn't like her for grudge-related reasons to begin with; being a fussy toddler that had been rudely woken up wasn't improving his temper in the slightest as he was kicking and screaming at the girl to put him down and leave him alone.

Mu, being herself, was too stubborn to put Grooves back into the pillow pile if it meant losing Dimitri in the ship, so she was in a bad disposition in all angles.

Cooking Cat would've helped if she could, but she was too busy being unconscious after Dimitri hit her on the head with a rolling pin from the kitchen and wouldn't be awake anytime soon. This left only Ewe to help Mustache Girl out since Rham was still busy with books, and Ewe was completely neutral on the whole Lava Planet situation that had occurred because of the young rebel.

"Would you like some assistance Miss Mustache Girl?" Ewe Asked.

"YES!"

Grooves was now crying again, he was too tired, young, and emotionally sensitive to be dealing with this much noise.

Ewe took this opportunity to slowly approach Dimitri with the intent to pounce him...she instead ended up tripping him and Mu, both helping by getting the bully to stop running, but also making the situation worse since three children now had carpet burns.

"What happened?! Who's crying?!" Cooking Cat yelled.

"Glasses. Dimitri. Running." Mu mumbled.

"Carpet." Dimitri added.

"Pain." Sniffled the young Grooves.

The feline climbed down one level to pick up the penguin, "I'll be right back with some damp cloths for all of you." She then scurried back to the kitchen and returned with the promised cloths, handing one of it to each injured child. "You should all really be careful with this kind of rough behavior, you're all only children."

Dimitri began to groan.

"And don't you start complaining to me because I'm being bossy."

Dimitri stopped groaning.

"None of you have proper mother figures at this time, so I'm filling in that role until things get back to normal, understood."

"Yes." The children and Ewe replied in unison.

"Good, now where are your glasses at baby?" Cooking Cat asked Grooves. The boy pointed to his glasses on the floor, cuing the friendly feline to retrieve them and put them back over his eyes.

"Thank you~" Grooves was a bit less cranky than earlier now that he had his glasses back, and far less tired after being awake for a while.

"No problem, now what does everybody want to do while we wait for Hat Kid to get back?"

Everyone was silent aside from Ewe who mentioned needing to finish her job and passed through the door to the machine room.

"We could play on Hat Kid's game console," Mu suggested, "I know how to make it work."

"I **guess** we could do that." Dimitri mumbled, following Mu to the console, "But I won't like it."

"Sure you won't."

—

"Are you sure they won't notice?" The Conductor asked, peeking out at the conglomeration of birds that were his kin from inside the train.

"You could've fooled me the entire day if ya hadn't told me who ye were Blake, and I've known ya since we were chicks!" Said Walter, "You'll be fine."

"Alright, I'll take yer word for it."

"And remember to not swear in front of anybody."

The Conductor laughed nervously in response.

"I'm serious."

"I know."

The three brothers walked down to the reunion site where more than a hundred birds were gathered. The reunion consisted of all the birds that belonged in the Conductor and his brothers' families, with most of his family consisting of mostly yellows while Greg's and Walter's consisted mostly of birds with their respected feather colors.

Walter's family was much smaller than the others since he had started very late in life to have kids, and his clutch only ended up having two chicks to call his own who also waited quite a while to have kids; as a result, all the owlets around his age and younger were from Walter's side of the family. The Conductor didn't really mind this since Walter and all of his kin were calm and likable compared to his own hot-headed family and Greg's mixed bag of both extremes. Redd's family was complicated as he never bothered to marry but did bother to have many illegitimate children that were still jotted down as part of the family. The Conductor was passing off as an orphaned child to one of Redd's illegitimates, so he could get away with making up stuff if any adults talked to him.

"Would you like to say hi to my grandies, Blake?" Walter asked.

"Sure!" He responded.

Getting through Walter's family was stress inducing since _everybody_ wanted to know about cute little owlet that was following him and Greg around, but eventually they made it and the Conductor did what he could to blend in with the children in his brother's family.

"Er, hi." The Conductor waved to one of the other owlets.

The other children waved back with a chorus of greetings and invitations to play games. He accepted with hesitation at first, but quickly found himself enjoying it. The children were simple minded and chose simple places to hide in hide and seek, and simple concepts for games like pictionary; he normally would have been bored and able to beat the children at any game, but he found it so much easier to play at their level and pretend not to know everything. Not only was the act convincing, but it was just more fun to not immediately find the hider or guess the pictures correctly.

Perhaps this was what the Lass was talking about. Sure it wasn't hide and seek inside pecking _air_ _vents_ or sledding down stairs, but he definitely understood what Hat Kid meant now by dumb kid stuff. From an adult standpoint, these thing were _very_ dumb, but from a child's standpoint it was wholesome fun.

The Conductor couldn't help but laugh, or perhaps giggle was a better word in this case, as the realization hit him. It was fun. This was fun. He was having genuine fun for the first time in years and actually enjoying it.

"What's so funny?" An older voice asked. Ah, peck, it was one of his own great-grandkids. The only great-grandkids in the family belonged to him since his own kids were almost teenagers when his brothers had their first kids, and these great grandkids were probably three years older than the age he was right now.

"I'm having fun, what's not to laugh about that?"

"That's dumb." The older child, a sand-colored bird named Cliff, stated. "You're also dumb for dressing up in that dumb hat. Dummy."

"What the-? Why I oughta-!" The Conductor was being provoked, and he wasn't going to have any of it.

"Don't listen to him, he's just upset that grand-uncle Blake isn't here and your hat looks like the one he wears all the time." One of the younger girls said to the Conductor. The little one was brushing a bird doll's hair and hugging it close.

"So what if I am? It's his fault that he hates us. My dad says he's actually a really cool guy, but what's the point in believing that if he never shows up to these dumb reunion things." Cliff grumbled, "I was looking forward to seeing him, but clearly he doesn't care about us."

"Er, you don't know that! Maybe he got sick, or eh, you know, something." The Conductor hesitated to speak. Did not going to these events really damage his family's view of him that badly?

"You don't even know him!" Cliff yelled, "I know you got picked up from the orphanage today because you were related to grand-uncle Blake, so that means you've never even been to a reunion before! They've had the same dumb pattern for the past three stickin' years! Everybody except grand-uncle Blake shows up, then he promises to show up to the next reunion, only to not show up to that one either!"

"That doesn't m-mean anything, he probably still cares!"

"Shut up!" Cliff pushed him off his feet.

The Conductor got riled up now. He got up and pushed Cliff back; it felt like fighting Redd back when he was an actual owlet, but this time he was fighting someone older than himself.

The two boys butt heads with each other and violently scratched at each other with their not-quite-sharp-yet claws. Things got really bad when Cliff decided to start snapping his beak at his opponent; it wasn't supposed to be anything other than intimidation, but what Cliff didn't know was that the child he was fighting had the aggression of an adult bird and would not be intimidated by such snapping until he actually got hurt.

Getting upset that the younger boy wouldn't back down, Cliff balled his claw into a fist and threw a punch.

The Conductor let out a scream in pain and fell back onto the ground. It would have been fine if he had been hit in the chest or the gut, but Cliff had aimed for his face, his one weak spot. His loud whimpers drew way too much attention to either child's liking, but he was too hurt to care.

"Cliff!" That sound like one of his grandchildren. The Conductor winced as he tried to open his eyes. It was indeed one of his granddaughters approaching, ready to scold her son. "Cliff, what did you do?!"

The children around the Conductor's age swarmed to the mother and gave simultaneous accounts of what happened, but they all pretty much shared the idea of Cliff bullying the 'new kid' and punching him in the face.

Greg and Walter had shown up at around this with the latter bird picking his young sibling up into his arms.

"Cliff, how could you've done that to that poor little thing?" Cliff's mother asked. The Conductor listened in while Walter comforted him. "You've never made a scene like this before and suddenly you decide to hit a kid. Haven't you got any consideration for children younger than yourself?"

"But-!"

"Don't you 'but' me! If you can't be nice to owlets younger than you, don't expect others to be nice in return!"

Even if that statement was intended for Cliff, it struck the Conductor just as hard. Figures that bad karma for bullying Grooves in the first place would get back at him tenfold.

"You doing alright brother?" Walter asked.

The Conductor shook his head, "I wanna go home."

"I'll call yer friend up." Greg said, heading to the nearest phone.

"I probably deserve that anyways for all the times I've been a peck neck to the family."

Walter hushed his sibling, not because of his use of the p-word, but because he couldn't stand to hear this self-deprecation from his brother.

Greg was now in use of a pay phone, based on the sounds of things it seemed that Ewe was on the other side. There was a lot of grumbling and such, but eventually Greg hung up.

"They'll beam you up in a few minutes." Greg told his siblings. Perhaps he shouldn't have egged Blake into showing up like this after all…

—

Snatcher had a feeling that he could use the powering function of a Time Piece to boost up certain objects for a while now. The second he test his theory on the Time Stop Hat at the edge of Mafia Town, he knew he had to use this special boost for a special three-step plan.

Using the Time Piece to power the hat, Snatcher could not only use the hat indefinitely, but it also stayed more true to it time-stopping name when powered up, as time because too slow to notice any move when using the hat. Snatcher took advantage of this, he then essentially ran across with his newfound power to reach Subcon Forest without the need of a boat. Step one complete.

Step two: Get through his own domain and find Vanessa's Manor.

"Is that you boss?" A Subconite asked Snatcher.

"Yes. Don't ask what happened, it's complicated and I don't have long before the kiddo catches up to me."

The Subconite obliged, but still followed Snatcher around as it could sense some anxiety from him. If Snatcher had to be completely honest, Subcon Forest was a lot more intimidating when he was a barely-adolescent youth instead of a powerful shadow creature. Even the small home he'd made inside a tree was big compared to him, and that made him feel a tinge of fear that would've been normal in his actual youth.

Despite his legs aching from running across the ocean, he did eventually make it to the broken bridge and break off from his companion to reach the manor. Step two also complete.

That just left step three, the fun part: go inside the manor and ruin Vanessa's day. She deserved to have her day ruined! She ruined his life, what was wrong with a single day of getting back at her?

Snatcher strolled in through the basement and entered the first floor before moving a few breakable things dangerously close to the edges of where they were placed and whistling as loudly as he humanly could and hiding in the kitchen.

This obviously got Vanessa's attention, queuing her usual process of shouting at the intruder in her house, except she wasn't expecting half the stuff in her hallway to fall onto the floor when she did so. Great. Now she had to clean that up. She went to pick up a picture frame that had fallen, but after placing it back on the wall she heard another crash. She looked up a second later only to see the other broken stuff was back in place. What the-? How?

Vanessa growled, either she was crazy or her intruder was seriously messing with her. It was probably the latter since she, Queen Vanessa, _obviously_ wasn't crazy. The sound of footsteps on the staircase changed her thought process and she followed upstairs.

She was immediately met with every door on the floor being left wide open, followed by another crashing sound and the doors all slamming shut at the same time. Vanessa chased after nothing aside from the sound of footsteps with another annoying joke on her being played every five minutes, the whole scenario going on for about thirty minutes.

This time she had wandered back into her bedroom, leaving the door wide open and giving Snatcher an idea.

"Hey Vanessa! Over here!" Snatcher called out.

"Luk-?" An hourglass was thrown towards her. The door it was thrown from was closed by the boy as a flash filled Vanessa's bedroom; when it cleared she was met with the world at a much shorter perspective.

"Have fun Vanny~" Snatcher cackled from the other side of the door. His laughter was short lived as he turned around to see a familiar face. A familiar, top hatted, blue-eyed, angry face.

"I can explain."

"You don't need to." Hat Kid mumbled.

"Kid, please, she ruined my life!"

"So you were going to ruin _hers_ as well?!"

"Actually I was just gonna ruin her day. I'm not crazy enough to alter the timeline like some people."

Hat Kid still wasn't amused. In fact, she was angry beyond belief. Her best friend just stabbed her in the back for the second time since they had met! She wanted to swear and curse at him. She wanted to tell him how annoying he was for this. She wanted to do a lot of things, but she was interrupted when the door to Vanessa's bedroom opened and a princess about Hat Kid and Snatcher's age peeked her head out, teary-eyed and clearly frightened.

"Hello?" The princess looked to the other two. "I don't want to alarm anybody, but there's a scary looking hole in my bedroom."

Hat Kid softly pushed Vanessa aside to see what she was talking about. What she found was a Time Rift, not a blue or a purple one, but a crimson one with uncontrollable sparks starting to emit from it.

"SNATCHER!" Hat Kid called out, "I hope you're pecking proud of yourself, because you've just created an unstable Time Rift with my unstable Time Piece!"

"Oh." Snatcher's face paled as he looked inside the room as well. "That wasn't part of the plan."

"Mafia is no longer ice statue! This is good news for Mafia." Said a mafia man (obviously, because who else would it be?) who was laying down on the floor next to the door. It was the same one Vanessa had frozen the first time Hat Kid had entered the manor.

"SWEET FREEDOM!" A distorted voice exclaimed from the far right corner of the room. The utterer of the voice looked like a bunch of rags in human form with too many eyes, but Hat Kid recognized it as the statue that was already in the room when she first arrived.

"My statues!" The princess exclaimed, now more annoyed than frightened at the situation.

"Unfreezing you two wasn't part of the plan either but good for you." Snatcher said to them, "If getting two birds while only aiming for one isn't one of my greater accomplishments for this relatively crummy day, I don't know what is."

"Guys! The Time Rift!"

"What about it?" Vanessa begrudgingly asked Hat Kid.

Before Hat Kid could say anything, the rift grew bigger and started trying to suck people in. The raggedy monster and mafia man had attempted to make a break for the door to the unused children's room, but they were both quickly picked up and dragged into the floating crimson chasm by force, their voices echoing for help within the rift.

"I need to get them and my Time Piece out before it gets out of control. Don't follow me!" Hat Kid said before jumping into the Rift herself.

"KID!" Snatcher began to panic. The child had gone into detail about the blue and purple rifts for him, but he knew nothing about this strange red rift and was genuinely worried about Hat Kid. "I need to go after her."

"No!" Vanessa screamed, clearly jealous that Snatcher cared about the other kid, "You ticked her off, she doesn't want you following her."

The two stared each other down for a solid minute before Snatcher grabbed Vanessa by the wrist and jumped into the Rift with her having to follow behind.

They screamed as time seemed to stop around them before finding themselves in a dark void. Pools of water were suspended in midair as a deep red color. Clock towers in the distance were visible, but appeared broken and cracked. Everything else in the rift appeared to look like a mixture of Subcon Forest at various points of time and Hat Kid's spaceship, and the temperature was constantly changing.

"Why would you do that?!" Vanessa asked.

"You were getting jealous again, like you _always_ do when I'm around other girls, so I took you with me so you can stop being a jealous little-"

A scream ran throughout the rift, forcing the couple to cover their ears.

"Lukey…what…what was that?"

Snatcher recognized the scream all too well. That sound was the border between his old and new life as Subcon's ruler. He said nothing as his lips could not form the words.

Words were not needed however as the rift adjusted itself to the appearance of a room Snatcher knew all too well. Across from the youths was a young man, a prince, chained by the upper arms with dark splotches of shadow littering his body and slowly consuming his entire being as he shook and called out for help. The man's body became limp as the darkness evaded it entirely. His squinted eyes opened up as yellow, tear-filled sockets as his calls became feeble whimpers.

Then the body twisted and turned as it let out same exact same heart-broken scream as before. The evading shadow ripped itself off of the prince's body, now a frost-bitten husk, and crashed onto the ground, writhing like a timid worm and fearing it's new form. His hands were talons, his legs were gone, his body was nothing but a shadow.

The rift changed immediately as the scene before was ripped away like paper and showed the full terror of Queen Vanessa rampaging through the village that was her kingdom and slaughtering all who dared mistook her majesty as a beast. He looked in the direction of a freezing individual covered in heavy blankets, a certain florist who the queen couldn't bear to look at without seething from her hatred; she dragged the screaming girl by by her braid to do as she pleased to the girl her prince cheated with.

The royal youths screamed in pure terror of the scenes as everything felt real and like they were happening all over again from an outside perspective. Every minute a scene of terror from their lives would flash before them; if the scene wasn't horrifying enough as it, the world would seem to darken into an even deeper red than the pools of water and twist the memories into something much worse.

Soon the memories weren't even their own. They were the memories of the other people trapped in the rift. Memories of the raggedy creature, seemingly living in terror inside Subcon and escaping to an equally terrible life of negligence and fear from the rest of the world before meeting their doom in the manor. Memories of the mafia man whose greatest fear was the sound of thunder and the sight of lighting, now personifying itself as a eldritch beast. Memories of many things Hat Kid had to endure to get home to her family.

It was cruel and unthinkable that something meant to control time could make a dreamscape that collected the worst moments of a person's life and twisted them into their absolute extremes. The two, despite their past issues, couldn't help put hold each other close and cry for the nightmares to stop. They cried but nothing could hear them once the nightmare was begun, their voices were muted.

As quickly at it had started, it had stopped. An image of a memory was cracking, and through the cracks, a child on a tall pillar could been seen swinging her umbrella at a the core of the rift. Each successive swing broke the image and the core more and more, and brought more and more light into the rift until the orb and the image completely shattered. The Time Piece emerged from the core's remains with the rift once again in a stable state and matching the usual look of a blue time rift, but with bits and pieces of each trapped individual's memories still floating about.

"K-id!" Snatcher choked out.

Hat Kid looked in his and Vanessa's direction, a mixed look of annoyance and relief on her face. The Time Piece glowed brightly as everybody in the rift was spit out of it, and dropped onto a pink and white carpet that Hat Kid and Snatcher recognized very well. The group sighed in relief to be free from the horrors that had plagued them at long last. They were safe now.

* * *

 **Iiiiiiiit's review time!**

 **Giraffeyla10: Sorry my pal, but I'm afraid Snatcher did a thing. I don't know if it's the thing you thought he'd do, but he did a thing.**

 **Inknroses: Yes, Snatcher used one very unstable Time Piece, and it backfired immensly.**

 **ConArtist Croc: You were right. :)**


	7. Act 7: Reconciliations

**An update? At 1 AM? Three months after this story SHOULD have been finished? It's more likely than you think.**

 **I'm gonna be straight and let y'all know I had ZERO idea on how to write Vanessa's mini-arc for this story. She and Snatcher having been in a bad relationship made it hard to figure out how to wrap up their conflict, but I think what I've gotten prepaired after a three month hiatus should be good. I've also got a Short Epilogue to put out and then I'll be done with this fic. I might make a sequel or a spin-off based off of what happened in the middle of these chapters if I feel like it...but we'll see.**

* * *

"You all saw that too right?!" Greg asked, "They appeared in the air and fell onto the ground!"

"Well that's usually what happens when people that can't fly magically appear in the air." Mu replied to him sassily. "I'm guessing you got the Time Piece back, Kid?"

Hat Kid raised the hourglass into the air, climbing out of the pile of people that were sucked into the Time Rift and investigating its current condition. After releasing all it unstable energy and letting it briefly disperse, the Time Piece was now in a more stable state.

If the Time Piece was no longer unstable, what did that mean for everybody that had been transformed by it? Hat Kid wondered this as she made her way to the Machine Room to see Rham and Ewe.

"We found the book you were looking for!" The nomad exclaimed, seeming quite proud of her and Rham's handiwork.

Hat Kid thanked the two of them as she looked into the book. The chapter she needed was really big and didn't precisely label everything, so it was still going to be a while. She had the book now though, so she dismissed Rham and Ewe to do as they pleased, which for them was Rham hanging out by the room while Ewe brushed his fur.

Out in the main hall, Snatcher and Vanessa were having a falling out. Cooking Cat and Greg had moved the bird children and several toys into the kitchen the second the argument began as they wanted no part in this. In contrast, the mafia man, Dimitri, and the raggedy creature, known as Shapeshifter, watched the fight unfold from the sidelines out of morbid curiosity.

"Why didn't you come back and apologize for leaving?!"

"You wrongly chained me up in the **basement** , Vanessa! I don't **owe** you an apology!"

"You were holding hands with another girl!"

"I was paying her for the flowers I bought!"

"What flowers?!" Vanessa asked in utter confusion.

"The flowers you knocked out of my hands and stepped on before you called the guards on me!" Snatcher loudly retorted to Vanessa with tears building up in his eyes. "The same flowers that I had painstakingly picked out because I knew I wasn't going to be back home with you before your birthday! The flowers I bought as a late birthday present so that you wouldn't think I forgot about your birthday because I was being a good boyfriend and because I loved you!"

Every sentence was parted by a broken inhale as Snatcher's anger and sadness finally collapsed on him after years of never speaking his mind towards his ex. It broke his heart to tell the truth when he was looking at the form of Vanessa he had fallen for, but he knew that the girl's physical form did not change the actions that she had committed to, the acts of abuse and torment before that he'd believed were tough love, and the torture she forced onto him when he realized how truly terrible she was far too late.

Vanessa listened to his rant in shock and horror as tears welled up in her as well. Shock at her love's response, and horror at how irritated and out of line he sounded. However his rant on flowers did hold some merit, she **had** been wondering if her prince had forgotten to get her a birthday present on her special day.

Actually, the fact he was at the flower shop should've been a red flag that he was getting her something and not a flag that he was cheating.

"I-I didn't know!" She panicked, "But now I do know...that...that means we can fix this! We can just date again and pretend this mishap never happened! I'm sure the citizens have missed seeing their lovely Queen!"

"Vanessa, those memories weren't complete fabrications! You killed the citizens of Subcon! Every last one of them! If not from the blistering cold, it was from starvation, or from the uncontrollable amount of magic you released transforming everything into a decrepit husk! They're terrified of you!"

Vanessa's voice faltered for a bit, "We can just talk them into trusting me again! You can mend any wound with a little bit of love, right? Because our love is undying and brimming with lig-"

"Our love is **dead** , Vanessa! I don't love you anymore!" Snatcher yelled louder than he ever had, his tears finally falling from his cheeks to the ground. "Our love died the moment you put me in chains! And if I had been smart enough to realize you were too possessive of me, it would've died even **sooner** and **possibly** without any issue!"

"That's not true! You promised we would alway love each other!"

"Only because I didn't realize I was planning to marry a witch that assumes everything right when it happens!"

"You could've told me you were getting something for me before you left!"

"It's called a **surprise** birthday present for a reason you clingy lady-cad, displayer of sinister impulse, and unobservant **freak**!"

The broken couple ran in separate directions with Snatcher running into the Bedroom while Vanessa bawled her way into the Machine Room, surprising Hat Kid by her arrival.

"You okay?" Hat Kid asked, already knowing the answer.

"No."

"Do you wanna talk about it?"

Vanessa sunk her head into a nearby pillow that Ewe had dragged in from the pillow pile in the Main Hall. "No."

"You want a cookie? Cooking Cat made them."

Another muffled "No".

"I can wait then." The Kid said, going back to her book with the princess' sniffling as background noise.

In the kitchen, the Conductor approached Grooves, deciding to get something off of his chest.

"Hey DJ…Grooves…" it was strange not saying the penguin's name in a manner that wasn't mocking.

"Mhmm?"

"I wanted to say…I'm... _sorry_ for what happened earlier today."

Grooves looked up from the picture he was drawing, surprised at his competitor's words.

"Shocking, I know, but I went through some things that made me realize maaaybe bullying you when we're in this position is needlessly cruel and that I should probably apologize before we're back to normal and in positions where the apology won't matter." He looked away, trying to think up how to wrap things up before looking back at Grooves. "Do you wanna…forget this whole rival thing for a while and just pretend we're friends?"

"Sure." The younger bird nodded, sitting the other down to his level and smiling as he handed him some crayons and paper.

Mustache Girl and Dimitri, meanwhile, had decided to take a break from playing video games, mostly because Dimitri had no experience with gaming and had gotten them a game over.

"Soooooo is it too late to say that you're a really good fighter?" The boy asked.

"Oh, _now_ you acknowledge my strength? Today of all days? What gives?"

"I'll admit, the few times we'd sparred before the Kid with the Hat landed on our planet, I had always been full of myself and using the help of my men to have an unfair advantage…"

"You don't say." Mu scoffed, her voice full of sarcasm.

"Let me finish! I just wanted to say that, fighting you as an equal, you are very skilled in the art of combat. Someone like yourself actually could pull off a role of power if trained properly, so I was wondering if-"

"You killed my family, ransacked my home, and forced me to live in a cave. There's no way in heck you're adopting me."

"Okay, that's fair enough…"

The two children were silent for another few minutes.

"Will you at least accept an apology in the form of a proper house?"

Mu gave him a quick "yes", closing the conversation. She'd ask for some specific conditions later, but for now she was just going to accept the house. Anything was better than an exposed cave by the beach.

Back again in the machine room, Hat Kid had finally found the passage she was looking for.

'Any changes directly caused by a person's desire when a Time Piece is unstable will automatically fix itself within 24 hours of the hourglass shattering to make the change, assuming a set time isn't already decided by the user. Other, indirect changes made by the Time Piece must be fixed manually, assuming they cause any harm to the current timeline.'

"Bingo!" Hat Kid exclaimed, running to the others to explain the good news.

"So we'll be back to normal by this time tomorrow?" Dimitri asked.

Hat Kid nodded, "Mr Mafia Man and Shapeshifter are also safe from eternal statuehood because of the second part. Everybody else aside from Vanessa should be normal again at whatever time tomorrow that the time thing happened today."

The aforementioned ex-statues cheered from somewhere in the back of the Main Hall as they went to separate directions to inform Snatcher and Vanessa, still in the rooms they ran to earlier.

"Good, I'm going to need a few tasty souls to sweeten my mood after what happened today." Snatcher said upon hearing the news from Shapeshifter. His voice was muffled with him being face-down in the pillow mountain.

"Don't you think maybe you should talk to Vanny for just a _little_ bit?"

"No."

The spirit sighed, "I know you two have bad blood, but the least you could do is try to better explain to her why what she did was wrong."

"Give me one good reason to do exactly that." He raised his hand up, making a 'one' with his pointing index finger.

"You can't just break her heart a second time when she's this vulnerable and expect it to go well when she changes back. She lived a perfect life with nobody to tell her 'no' or discourage bad behavior in courtship, so really it's just a matter of letting her know her methods were wrong while she's back in a flexible mindset." Shapeshifter grumbled femininity, she was getting really tired of his attitude. "Less people will die in the manor if Vanessa isn't killing everybody she meet, also. So maybe you two could compromise something so she doesn't freeze people."

"You're just trying to get me back together with her!"

"That's not what I said Luke!"

The prince flinched. His angered expression becoming fearful.

She sighed, "I'm not even sure how you got to that conclusion. All I'm asking of you is this: talk to her about what happened, calmly tell her why you don't want to get back together, and explain to her why those things she did hurt. You don't even need to become friends, you can just cut all ties with each other for the rest of eternity. Does that sound reasonable?"

"It might not work, but I can try while she's unable to hurt anybody."

"Does that sound **reasonable**?"

Snatcher eyed the floor before answering "yes" and looking back up to the Shapeshifter.

"Hey, you know what's weird."

"What?"

"You voice sounded much more ambiguous before now, and you knew my name…"

She looked away. "I thought a familiar voice was necessary…even if I don't use it anymore. The most I want is to put things back together after her highness' misunderstandings between you and I."

Snatcher stared at her before standing up and walking outside the bedroom, wondering if Vanessa really could be reasoned with...probably not.

At around the same time that Snatcher was given the good news and his pep talk, Vanessa was going through a similar scenario with the mafia goon, still in the Machine Room.

"Mafia is free and scary Ice Lady does not need to worry about growing up again as Ice Child, so why does Ice Child still act sad?"

"It's because of Lukey." Vanessa weeped.

"Ah, Mafia sees now." The man nodded, "Ice Child is unsure about life choices after big reveal. It is understandable. Mafia would be upset too if Mafia Wife told Mafia that he was a bad husband."

"W...what?" She wiped her tear to look at the man with confusion.

"It simple." He sat down, knowing this would take some explaining, "Ice Child and Prince Child meet and fall in love because they see healthy relationship. Prince Child feels betrayed when locked up for buying flowers, then realizes relationship was very bad, like poison. Prince Child does not want to go back to bad, toxic relationship after being free from it."

"Toxic?! You think our relationship was toxic?" She asked him. "You have no right to judge! You don't know what it was like before! We were perfect together! I cut his hair to be my length and color so we matched, kept him close to me at all times, and protected him from any other girls that would want to take advantage!"

"Did Prince Child ask for those things?"

"No, but I did in the name of love anyways! He might not have been happy about it, but I _did_ it."

The mafia man huffed, "Ice Child does not seem to understand consent."

"What's that supposed to mean?!" She sat upright in a defensive manner. What could this idiotic brute know about love then she didn't know already?

"Mafia is married man. Mafia thinks of many things to do for wife, but does not do them on whim because some things may go against Mafia Wife's comfort zone."

Vanessa listened to the strange man, confused.

"As much as Mafia wants to surprise Wife with free haircut or back massage, Mafia must first know if wife is okay with such things. If okay, Mafia will surprise her with those things. If not, Mafia will accept it and think of different surprise. Also applies with being too close to wife, not everybody wants to be surrounded by people all the time. Ice Child should have known if Prince Child would be mad about certain things before doing them. Did Prince Child ever do anything that angered Ice Child before bad things happened?"

"Well…" She paused, wanting to defend herself on the matter but coming up empty handed. The flower thing couldn't count on her side anyways. "...No…"

"Does child understand now?"

As much as she hated to admit it (and she was quite sure it was because her dumb child body was more vulnerable to learning important life lessons), but this knuckleheaded man in a suit had a good point. She was always doing everything without considering the consequences, and it had made many people upset as a result. At the time she thought they were just ungrateful, but now it made sense. She wasn't happy about it, and it was too late to fix anything now, but it did make sense.

"Unfortunately yes, I _do_ understand now. I...can't just do something without knowing how others feel about it first." Vanessa slouched from her defensive stance, feeling defeated, "And I also can't hope to make up for everything I've done already because of it."

"Sadly, most important lessons are learned when it too late." The man said, standing back up and heading towards the door. "Like trying to eat only sweets all day. Child may not realize eating only sweets will hurt stomach until stomach is already full of sweets and hurting badly."

"What do I do then?" She got up as well.

The goon shrugged. "Mafia unsure. Mafia only grow wise through experience, and Mafia never break heart before. Ice Child will have to plan through this one on her own."

With the Mafia goon now gone from the room, Vanessa was left alone to her own thoughts. Her eyes scanned the room while she thought, were drawn to a plate of cookies by the pillows she was sitting on.

Since the mafia man's words on sweets had made her hungry, she picked up the plate and ate some cookies while she paced the room to think; pacing had already helped her think, it was why she always paced back and forth when people intruded upon her home. There was a slip of paper at the bottom of the plate when all the cookies were eaten, so she took it and flipped it over to find handwriting.

'I don't know anything about relationships, but I think you should apologize to Snatcher' read the note. It was signed, but she couldn't figure out what the signature spelled out. She had a feeling it was from her little hat-wearing intruder though.

Pocketing the note somewhere, Vanessa stepped out of the Machine Room, where her prince...where _Snatcher_ was leaving the Bedroom.

They locked eyes with each other, audibly sighing. They both knew what had to be done on their parts, might as well get it over with.

"Hey…" they both started.

"I'm sorry…"

"What?"

"I said I'm sorry!" Vanessa said, looking away. "I was too possessive and clingy, and I assumed everything the second something happened." She made eye contact with him again, "I punished you for liking things other than myself, and did things without asking, and just in general did things a good girlfriend shouldn't do to her boyfriend…"

"Yeah. You did." The other huffed, frowning.

"Point is, you have every reason to not date me again when things go back to normal."

"Alright." That made things easier for him. He didn't even need to argue to not get together.

"But…I want to fix what I broke, so can we be friends again…? _Just_ friends?"

"Eh…" he thought for a second. He was still mad, and you don't really become friends with someone you're mad at. "How about we just stick with non-aggressive neighbors? We know we exist, but we don't associate unless something important comes up."

"Yeah that seems fair." Vanessa said quickly and understandably. She knew asking to be friends was a bit too much at this time, but it didn't hurt to have tried. "How do I do that?"

"Maybe start by not freezing everybody that enters your house, that'd be nice."

"Deal." She nodded cutely. The neighbors shook hands to seal the deal. Snatcher would've made a contract for the matter, but decided not to push his luck with Vanessa and legal documents, he was mad and would never forgive her, but at least that part of their lives had been given a proper, If unusual, close.

Hat Kid congratulated the neighbors on settling their differences in her head as she finished the Time Piece check that had been interrupted by the day's series of events. She ran off to properly document her check, as well as the inappropriate usage of her Time Pieces so that she would not get in trouble with her superiors for her friends trying to cheer her up. She'd had a lot of explaining to do when she got home after Mustache Girl's incident, and she'd rather not have to do that again.

Hat Kid came back to the Main Hall after finishing her important work, content to see everything peaceful once again. Snatcher and Vanessa were awkwardly catching up on each other's history from the past 1,000 years so they wouldn't have to do it when they got back, the directors had convinced Greg to give them a piggyback ride, Mu and Dimitri were apparently bullying the mafia man (not that she was surprised since Mu was a rebel and Dimitri was just tagging along), Rham and Ewe were being themselves, and Cooking Cat was cleaning the dishes so the place was a bit more sanitary, followed by fixing up dinner for everyone. Overall, everything seemed perfectly fine.

'I should join in on the fun!' Hat Kid thought to herself. And so she did, tagging one unsuspecting kid and allowing things to naturally escalate from there. The games that were had were nothing less than the expected, but it was certainly interesting to have so many kids play with her at the same time.

Hat Kid had let Greg and the mafia goon return back to the planet after a while, with Shapeshifter joining in on the games from time to time; she played in the form of a cute red-headed girl, around Snatcher and Vanessa's current ages, with freckles and a flower in her hair. She, too, seemed to leave the ship some time after Cooking Cat announced dinner, leaving some people, not including the royal neighbors and Hat Kid, clueless as to who the strange child was.

Dinner went by quickly and without complaint, and was followed by several more sessions of play before the children fell victim to the natural limits of a young person's stamina.

The youngest, the Conductor and Grooves, fell asleep while in action and were propped against a group of pillows with a blanket covering both of their tiny bodies. Dimitri passed out at a seemingly random time after them and was left alone simply because it was Dimitri; although a pillow seemed to have been tossed over his body when nobody was looking. Rham fell asleep somewhere farther away from the others, but was still accompanied by Ewe, who rested on his head as she sang a lullaby to the large baby goat.

Snatcher and Vanessa sat down in a space between the Alpine Kids and the birds, back to back as them mumbled to themselves before shutting their eyes. The last to sleep were Hat Kid and Mu, who stole two pillows from the original pillow pile and fell asleep next to Conductor and Grooves, finally followed by Cooking Cat.

The one true adult at the time curled up in the typical feline fashion, glad to get some rest after the stressful day that was already behind her. Hat Kid woke up slightly to look around the room, seeing her friends (and Vanessa) in a state of peace made her smile contently. She yawned, and returned to dreaming sweet dreams.

* * *

 **I've got a epilogue ready for later today or tomorrow as this story (minus some errors I'll need to fix) will be FINISHED.**

 **Review Time!**

 **CeleneTheAngel: I can promise you after the events of this story, pretty much everybody involved, except for the Alpine kiddos who were just here to do their best, learned an important lesson today.**

 **Awawawah: We got ya covered. Apology has been delivered.**

 **ConArtist Croc: Yep, they've learned.**

 **Giraffeyla10: Seeing the worst of one's own past is never fun. Let's be frank.**

 **Blkey3981: I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a lot of personal-lore surrounding DBS that I want to share with in another story.**

 **Inknroses: Yeah, the mafia and poor shapeshifter kinda lost the lottery in terms of having peaceful deaths, but at least they're alive now.**

 **Also, not a review, but happy belated 1st anniversary to A Hat in Time! Congratulations you funky little platformer!**


	8. Epilogue

Hat Kid woke up not entirely sure why she was in the main hall instead of her bedroom, but then she remembered the events of yesterday and felt a sense of shock in realizing it was already Sunday. Yesterday felt like both the longest and shortest Saturday in existence.

Hat Kid sat up to look around. Aside from Vanessa, who still had a few hours of a second childhood left, everybody else was back to normal.

The Conductor and Grooves were still huddled, but the blanket they were under could only cover one of them now and they'd both probably deny sleeping next to each other when they went back to work tomorrow, Rham snored deeply with Ewe resting on his head while Mafia Boss made a puddle of drool next to the pillow that had fallen to his side, and Snatcher looked a bit like a pretzeled snake with how he was sleeping while the young Vanessa hugged the spirit's tail. Hat Kid giggled at the scene, noticing that Cooking Cat had already left, probably to do what she did best back in Mafia Town.

The ship's dainty little owner waltzed over to her bedroom with some of yesterday's toys in her arms, clearing things out before she cleaned up for the day. When both the main hall and herself were mostly clean, she returned to see people waking up from their slumbers with the sort of reactions that she naturally anticipated.

"Hey Kiddo, looks like you were right! Everything's pretty much normal aside from, well, the obvious." Snatcher said, carrying the princess with just one arm. "Are you sure we can't just keep her like this? She'd certainly be less threatening regardless."

Vanessa, still half asleep, stuck her tongue out at Snatcher.

"How rude! Guess I'll just be taking you back to your room then so we don't have to interact for the rest of eternity."

"I have no objections to that…"

"Good." He looked to Hat Kid and waved with his free hand, "Smell ya later kiddo, hopefully next weekend won't be spent with people getting sick or turned into brats."

Without any second thought, Snatcher leapt out of the window, looking like a sort of majestic eel as he space-swam back to Subcon Forest.

The Conductor and Grooves were having a video conversation with Greg, hearing some surprising news.

"I actually have a grand-nephew named after me?" The Conductor asked,

Greg nodded, "It's strange. He was found this morning along with a bunch of other chicks. The CAW agents on the train yesterday were staking out a fraud orphanage that wasn't raising kids under the right conditions. At least half the kids there were recently kidnapped except for little Blake the Second."

"How do they know this little Darling is part of your family?" Grooves asked.

"CAW's got some crazy new DNA researching tools and used them to find the relatives of all the found kids, so they can be returned to their proper families. I've booked an appointment to meet the little lad with Walter later today."

The Conductor looked to the floor, taking in everything he'd just heard. "What's the lad look like?"

Greg pulled out a picture of a little owlet who was the spitting image of what the Conductor looked like yesterday. It was shocking for everybody to see.

"I didn't even think Redd had any normal kids…" The Conductor thought for a moment. Hat Kid had said any indirect changes made to the timeline by the unstable Time Piece wouldn't revert so…maybe the timeline was kind enough to let him get away with his bluff about Redd having grandkids. "You know what, I think I'll visit him too. I've gotta start being a better grandpa to me family."

Hat Kid drowned out the rest of the conversation between the birds and waves goodbye to the director's when they left. She did the same when Rham and Ewe left, the latter chattering about how excited she was to tell the whole story to her brother Bahh when they got back.

Last, but not least, were Mustache Girl and Mafia Boss, arguing about the deal they'd made yesterday and just how it'd go about.

"I want a two story."

"You're nine! What are you going to do with the second floor?"

"That's none of your business. Two floors, or I'm jarring you again."

"Ugh, Fine. Deal."

Mu threw her fists in the air with a sharp "yes!", and the two shook hands over a long sheet of paper written and signed in actual pen. With that out of the way, the last two guests left for Mafia Town...but not without Mu giving Hat Kid a big hug.

"Next week, we're hanging out in my awesome new house." Mu said with a smug look.

"Peck yeah!" The other cheered, hugging back before her friend left.

As the only person left on the ship aside from Rumbi, Hat Kid set off to her own home with a sigh, not of glumness, but of joy.

* * *

 **Thank you everybody who read this story to the very end. Please leave a review if you want so I can know what you thought of the story as a whole. I will leave the story as unfinished for now in order to find and repair any grammatical errors or errors in general in the story.**

 **With that under wraps, I say Adios!**


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